Man on the Dunes was completed by Willem de Kooning in 1971. It embraces a grotesque figural comedy, utilizing techniques from both painting and drawing that were typical of the artist’s work in this period. These methods allowed the artist to cultivate a sense of dissonance in the picture through tensions between figuration and abstraction, punctuated by an atypical use of blended color and empty space, and sharpened by opposing senses of directionality.